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William F. May, 95, Dies; Helped Found Film Society

William F. May, who led the American Can Company during a 15-year period of expansion beginning in 1965 and helped found the Film Society of Lincoln Center, died on Sunday in Greenwich, Conn. He was 95.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his daughter Katherine M. Bickford, known as Koko.

Mr. May was later dean of the graduate school of business administration at New York University, chairman of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation and a longtime board member of The New York Times Company.

He had been with American Can for 27 years, rising through its executive ranks, when he took over in 1965 as chairman and chief executive at its headquarters in Manhattan, which he moved to a wooded site in north Greenwich five years later.

As chief executive, Mr. May continued to extend the company’s reach into consumer products, acquiring, among other companies, the Butterick pattern company and the Sam Goody record and electronics stores.

He also shut down unprofitable plants and demoted the tin can, which, after his restructuring of the company, accounted for just a quarter of American Can’s operating income. Over the next eight years, the company’s annual sales rose to $4.5 billion from $1.8 billion. He retired in 1980.

After shedding its packaging and paper operations, the company, reorganized as a financial services conglomerate, was renamed the Primerica Corporation in 1987 and later merged with the Commercial Credit Group, from which Citigroup evolved.

In 1967, Mr. May was elected to the board of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts with a specific mandate: build the center’s film department, founded four years earlier, into a constituent of the center, on an equal footing with the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera.

Amos Vogel, the director of the film committee and its annual festival, and Richard Roud, the festival’s program director, attended to the artistic side. Mr. May set about raising money.

Photo

William F. May.

It was touch and go as the nascent organization lurched from crisis to crisis in its first years. Lincoln Center withdrew its financial support for the committee at the end of 1968, and Mr. Vogel resigned.

But the next year, after finding new donors and sources of financial support, Mr. May and two other Lincoln Center executives, Martin E. Segal and Schuyler G. Chapin, founded the Film Society of Lincoln Center, allowing film to assume its place in the arts center.

Speaking at the New York Film Festival in 1975, Mr. May celebrated a hard-won victory. “Each year, and many annual deficits ago, we feared for the festival’s life,” he said. “But it goes on. And it will.”

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William Frederick May was born on Oct. 25, 1915, in Chicago. He attended Oak Park High School. After earning a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Rochester in 1937, he did graduate work in organic chemistry at the University of Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology.

He began working for DuPont as part of the team that developed rustproof paint before joining American Can in 1938 as a lab technician in Maywood, a Chicago suburb. There he rose to supervisor of the container department.

He held a number of executive posts at American Can in research, manufacturing, industrial relations, marketing, sales and administration. In 1950, he completed the advanced management course at Harvard.

After retiring from American Can, Mr. May was dean of N.Y.U.’s graduate school of business administration for four years. As chairman of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, he helped raised tens of millions of dollars for the restoration of those landmarks.

Mr. May was a director of The Times Company from 1971 to 1986, serving with the former secretary of state, Cyrus R. Vance, and the Times columnist James B. Reston, among others.

He also served on the boards of New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Salomon Brothers, Johns-Manville and Bankers Trust.

In addition to his daughter Katherine, Mr. May, who lived in Greenwich and Rockport, Me., is survived by his wife, the former Kathleen Thompson; another daughter, Elizabeth S. May; four grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

A version of this article appears in print on September 21, 2011, on Page B19 of the New York edition with the headline: William F. May, 95, Dies; Helped Found Film Society. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe